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The following article titled "Professional hackers attempt to 'copyright' viruses" was posted on statesman.com yesterday.

http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/05/05/0505techfiller.html

I was trying to upgrade a SQL 2000 server to SQL 2005 and the upgrade kept failing.  The first error I would see was "An installation package for the product Microsoft SQL Server Native Client cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package 'sqlncli.msi'."  Other parts also failed to install.  I looked at the installation log files, but they were so large and there were so many messages about it trying to locate packages, registry entries, etc., it was impossible to tell what represented an error and what did not. [more]

I opened a case with Microsoft (which could be a pretty good gotcha in itself), and sent the log files.  The tech seemed to know immediately what the problem was.  It was caused by the fact that a Microsoft SQL Server Native Client was already installed on the machine.  I think it was installed by the some third party software and it was a later version than what came with SQL 2005.  I removed the Microsoft SQL Server Native Client and the installation went fine with no errors.  Later I received a follow up call from Microsoft and they said they had received many reports of this issue and they would have this fixed in SQL 2008.

I recently ran into an issue using VMware Converter to move a VM from VMware Server to VMware ESX v3.0.2. I had already successfully converted two other VMs in this manner, every time I started the conversion it would bomb out during the creation of the VM on ESX. The log files in my profile at …\<username>\Local Settings\Temp\1\vmware-temp indicted the following error. [more]

'P2V' 5748 error] [task,295] Task failed: P2VError UFAD_SYSTEM_ERROR(Invalid response code: 400 Bad Request)

I did some research and found that this can often be caused by invalid ASCII characters in the VM name or path. I looked and I didn’t have anything unusual in there; all standard alpha characters. Then I got to looking around and found that the “Notes” section of the VM Summary did have some double dashes ( -- ) and periods ( . ) in it. I didn’t think that should cause an issue, but I decided to just take out all the text in the Notes section anyway. When I fired off the conversion again it worked! There must have been something in that text that was causing an issue. Here is the notes section is was choking on.

Package Testing Server – Windows Server 2003 SP2 – TS – Windows 2003 server template. Setup to match production TS Cluster.

Google Blog has a good article "How to avoid getting hooked" by the Google Security Team as part of a series of posts devoted to online security.  In this particular post, they are focusing on phishing attacks and ways you can protect yourself.  To read the Blog article, go to http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-avoid-getting-hooked.html

The link below is an interesting article from the latest SANS NewBites email where attackers bribed gas station clerks to allow them to install skimmers inside the gas station’s card readers.  The British pound is worth about $2 US, so you can roughly double the numbers in the article to get U.S. currency. [more]

In the SANS email, one of the SANS commentators said: “This story highlights how once physical security, in this case the attendants, is compromised then all the technical security controls cannot protect you.  Have a look at your own information security infrastructure and see what can be bought for GBP 15,000 (US$29,737), would it be a new firewall or your firewall administrator?”

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.2211223.0.Scots_police_break_1m_credit_card_fraud_linked_to_terrorism.php

Yesterday the following was published on Microsft TechNet:

"Today we are happy to announce that Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) has released to manufacturing (RTM). Windows XP SP3 bits are now working their way through our manufacturing channels to be available to OEM and Enterprise customers. [more]

We are also in the final stages of preparing for release to the web (i.e. you!) on April 29th, via Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center. Online documentation for Windows XP SP3, such as Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and the Microsoft TechNet Windows XP TechCenter, will be updated then. For customers who use Windows XP at home, Windows XP SP3 Automatic Update distribution for users at home will begin in early summer. 

Thanks to everyone here who installed the public betas – you not only gave us detailed feedback but also helped each other out with timely troubleshooting. Through the beta program we found several important issues and were able to confirm some essential fixes. We couldn’t have done this without you.

We will still be monitoring this forum during the next few weeks in case you have more feedback about the release of Windows XP SP3.

On behalf of myself, Shashank Bansal and Windows Serviceability, many thanks.

Chris Keroack
Release Manager, Windows XP Service Pack 3
Windows Serviceability"

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3214173&SiteID=17

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=68c48dad-bc34-40be-8d85-6bb4f56f5110&displaylang=en

UPDATE: This morning Microsoft released XP SP3 to the public and then delayed it because of a compatibility problem with their Dynamics software products.  I didn't see a posting on Microsoft's site, but I did see this article: http://www.crn.com/software/207403064

From time to time when I've been out of town working with offline files, I would get an "Incorrect Parameter" error when I tried to synchronize the files (usually when I had returned home and was plugged directly into our network).  This happened to me when out of town recently at the end of a day when I'd created quite a few files (a few hundred) in a customer's folder tree.

I thought it might be related to creating so many new files so I copied the bulk of the new files (fortunately, they were mostly located in a single four-deep folder set) to a temporary folder on my laptop then deleted them from the offline files.  Also, note if you've created folders while offline but have not synchronized them yet, you can still delete the folders while offline.  If they've been synchronized, you can't delete them unless you're online.  [more]

I then connected via Cisco VPN and tried to synchronize and it worked.

Finally, while online, I copied the new folder set to the customer's folders online (which copied them directly to the server) then synchronized to get them back into the offline set.

The alternative was to work on an offline copy then manually synchronize them once I was back in the network and to nuke my offline files to get synchronization to work again.  This is what Microsoft recommends and I've done it numerous time.

This was a preferable solution.

You can use the Vista Task Scheduler to launch applications with admin privilege without the User Account Control (UAC) confirmation dialog.  To do this: [more]

• Open Task Scheduler
• Create a new folder for the application you want to launch, or use an existing folder (if it seems to fit)
• Create a new task
  • General
    • Name: <something simple, this is how you will refer to the task when launching it>
    • Description: <where you can give a lot more detail about what you’re doing>
    • Run only when user is logged on
    • Run with highest privileges
  • Actions
    • Start a program <path to your program, arguments, etc.>
  • Conditions
    • <Adjust as needed>
  • Settings
    • Allow task to be run on demand
    • <Adjust other settings as needed>
• Once the new task is created, you can update your shortcut to the application with the following command (or just run it from the command line):
  C:\Windows\System32\schtasks.exe /run /tn "\<folder where task is located in task scheduler>\<name of task, see above>"

One of the nice side benefits in doing things this way is you get to use the Task Scheduler’s built-in logging capabilities.

Windows has a tendency to cache negative DNS lookups so that even if you fix a DNS problem you still cannot look up a name. A negative DNS lookup occurs when trying to resolve the address for a name that has no corresponding DNS record.  There is a registry entry that specifies cache times for DNS.  One of them specifies how long to cache these negative entries.  I would suggest setting it to zero so it will always try to query a DNS server even though the name did not exist before.  Doing this might save you some confusion when troubleshooting DNS issues.  Read about it here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318803.

There is also a dnscmd Windows Support tool that is handy for updating DNS without having to run the GUI.  You can read about it here http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/5c497b2e-3387-4ecf-adf5-562045620a961033.mspx.